1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer processing and, more particularly, to the performance of data management processes such as backup operations on computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
As computers become more integral to modern business and industry, maintaining constant availability and maximizing responsiveness assumes a greater importance. A trend is developing whereby computer systems that have traditionally been used primarily during only a portion of each day, such as business hours, may now be in high demand throughout the day and night, everyday (so-called 24×7). Furthermore, it may be difficult to predict in advance when system demand may be high or low.
Various data management tasks, such as data backup, virus detection, and search indexing, have traditionally been scheduled late at night or on weekends to minimize interference with user applications. However, due to the increased demand for computer system resources during previously “off-peak” hours, it has become more difficult to reliably schedule these data management tasks when demand is low.
Furthermore, since many data management tasks are designed to complete their desired operations very quickly, they may consume large amounts of system resources during the time they are running. The performance of other applications may thus be negatively impacted if they are concurrently run with the data management tasks. For example, many data backup applications are designed to minimize the length of time a backup operation requires by transferring data to a backup medium at very high transfer rates. However, the I/O bandwidth consumed by such operations may noticeably interfere with other applications that also require I/O access at the same time.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, for example, a backup session associated with a backup application may be scheduled to execute once a day, at the same time every day. Resource utilization due to the scheduled backup sessions is illustrated by the solid line. As depicted by the dashed line, resource utilization by one or more user applications may fluctuate gradually over time. Unfortunately, as the figure also illustrates, the backup session may be scheduled at times when demand for the I/O resources by the user applications is also high. This may therefore result in decreased performance from the user's perspective.